Science

This chapter explores the role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in global climate governance. The IPCC represents one of the most ambitious and influential efforts ever undertaken by the international community to provide policy-relevant science. The joint award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC in 2007 underlined the authoritative status of scientific knowledge in policymaking on climate change. The chapter combines constructivist approaches to explore how and with what effects the IPCC acts as a politically powerful agent in climate politics even if the organization itself claims to be neutral and not policy prescriptive. Based on these empirical findings, it asks whether the IPCC is robust enough to address future challenges in a changing political architecture and outlines some of the questions to be addressed by future research.